Call Center

Regardless of whether you made it to ITEXPO in Miami or not - these are some of the important happenings at the show produced by the team at TMC's Content Boost dicision which provides news, white papers and more for companies in every industry. Hope you find them useful.

I’m on the phone with ThinkGeek because I purchased something which they shipped incorrectly. I tried email and didn’t get a response. They do say there is a 48-hour window which technically ends tomorrow but I’m not very patient.

Last night, GENBAND hosted a gala premiere at Ruby Skye in San Francisco for its official Kandy launch - the transitional solution from the communications hardware company which positions them as a seller of cloud-solutions. The point of the event was two-fold... Establish the brand Kandy into the minds of attendees who consisted of the media, analysts, customers and partners and also to show off the partner ecosystem which is beginning to flourish.

The company seemed to nail it on both parts - the extravagant event was not inexpensive and it was choreographed perfectly. Many attendees told me they couldn't believe the investment.

California has come up with a law that hurts the very people it says it is protecting by making it difficult to record call center transactions. Penal code 632 of California law says in-part:

(a) Every person who, intentionally and without the consent of
all parties to a confidential communication, by means of any
electronic amplifying or recording device, eavesdrops upon or records
the confidential communication, whether the communication is carried
on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of a
telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio, shall be
punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars
($2,500), or imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding one year,
or in the state prison, or by both that fine and imprisonment. If the
person has previously been convicted of a violation of this section
or Section 631, 632.5, 632.6, 632.7, or 636, the person shall be
punished by a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars ($10,000), by
imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding one year, or in the
state prison, or by both that fine and imprisonment.

This is part of a more bewildering law Penal Code 630-638 that seems to be designed to make it exceedingly difficult to do business in the state.

The challenge for business owners is they need to record calls for many reasons such as quality control and government compliance. Now, it is potentially illegal to record such calls without the consent of the caller.

Then there is the importance of keeping a record of all calls for the caller's own protection.

The following diagram is borrowed from the substantial cranial database of TMC partner in WebRTC Expo and UC University, Phil Edholm who was a major tech driver at Nortel and Avaya for decades. It was modified a bit by me.

The state of the PBX market can be summed up by this chart showing existing vendors getting squeezed between Microsoft coming from the OS down, Cisco coming from the router out and cloud and open-source coming from the bottom up in terms of pricing. In short, it is a tough time to be a PBX vendor.

Alan Percy had a challenge... The Senior Director of Marketing at AudioCodes saw the promise of WebRTC three years ago... And he saw how disruptive it could be for his company which provides communications equipment for enterprises and communications service providers. He approached his engineers and told them they need to start thinking seriously about this new standard.

Over the past few decades as telephony has opened up, we have seen the advent of APIs on computers which allowed better control of voice communications. Things like softphones and PC PBXs startd to appear in the nineties. Soon thereafter we saw voice get packetized as it travelled over IP networks. Big data, analytics and a host of technologies have evolved to a point where voice will be heading to a new frontier – and smart voice will be born.

GENBAND Perspectives 14 kicks off this morning - expect the live blog here... Last night the company hosted a networking reception where I had a chance to speak randomly with one of the company's customers in Mississippi - an ILEC becoming a CLEC. The person I spoke with said they actually purchased the equipment from Nortel just before that company went under and GENBAND acquired the assets. He went on to say he is very happy with the road map GENBAND is on and how they handled the acquisition.

I'm here in Indianapolis, Indiana and will be live blogging the Interactive Intelligence Interactions 2014 event where I expect to break some big news. Moreover, I will be the MC of the CX Hot Trends (customer experience) Event which kicks off this afternoon and tomorrow. More to come soon!